Published 4:00 am, Friday, May 5, 1995

On Wednesday night at the Center for the
Arts Theater
at Yerba Buena Gardens, an American Conservatory Theater audience finally got to see the "Hecuba" they've been waiting for. But it's what they heard that made the most penetrating impression in artistic director Carey Perloff's twice-delayed production of the Euripides tragedy.

Gathering power as it goes, this clear and vibrantly acted staging proves well worth the wait.

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From composer David Lang's rich strophic choruses thrillingly sung by the female KITKA ensemble and the lean cadences of Timberlake Wertenbaker's new translation, to the raw animal grief of Olympia Dukakis in the title role and the distracting crunch of dirt beneath the actors' feet onstage, this is a "Hecuba" that registers most emphatically as an aural experience.

SOBS AND PANTING

It works, by and large, by transmitting the play's primal emotions and political arguments into a multivoiced exhortation, a theatricalized concert of sobs and choral panting, bitter women's vows, guilty men's sotto voce confessions

and a moaning wind (sound by Stephen LeGrand) that will waft the Greeks back home in their ships now that the Trojan War is over.

In Euripides' ancient feminist tragedy, the proud Trojan queen is humbled in slavery, stunned by the blood sacrifice of her daughter and finally maddened to revenge by the murder of her young son.

IMAGINATION IN SOUNDS

ACT's production is more powerful for what its arresting sounds make you imagine, as if you were hearing the tale chanted in flickering firelight, than for what you witness in Perloff's clear if occa

sionally misfired direction.

"Hecuba" is structured around two distinct events, the second prefigured in a nightmare prologue. As we first catch sight of Dukakis, crouched in a cave of Kate Edmunds' set of canted bleached rock in Peter Maradudin's gray half-light, the voice of her young son Polydorus (Darren Bridgett) foretells his own death at sea as a shadow image of the child floats on a sheer canopy overhead. (The production is a cleaner visual cousin to Perloff's fussier "Antigone" at the Stage Door Theater two seasons back.)

A SACRIFICE

Before the boy's murder and its consequences can unfold, Hecuba must first endure the sacrifice of her daughter Polyxena (a striking but somewhat vocally stiff Elisabeth Imboden) mandated by the Greeks. Designer Donna Zakowska's caped trench coats and heavy black boots give the Greek army a vaguely Third Reichian air of menace over the Trojan women in their long robes and sandals.

But there's no simply drawn evil in "Hecuba." Ken Ruta's ruminative Odysseus and James Carpenter's conscience-stricken Agamemnon -- a king who can "question the power of females" even as his watchful squint ac knowledges it -- underline the play's complexity and texture. Wertenbaker's translation/adaptation celebrates, with a grim bluntness, the oppressed Trojan "bitches" who exact their revenge.

But it's just as keen on the demands of the state and the politics of compromise that drive the Greeks and the oily Thracian king Polymester (a sweaty Stephen Markle in gaudy colors).

RISK-TAKING DUKAKIS

Dukakis gives a risky, committed performance as an old woman whose grief moves her from staggering immobility to the cooly efficient calculations for revenge and beyond to the bleak precipice that looms ahead. Hers is a demolished yet sinewy muscular queen and mother, bare arms raised in an agonized rictus, spine hunched, eyes staring deeply inward. Dukakis can make the line, "I am misfortune itself," pay off as an understated afterthought; her wasted body and raking, half-crazed voice have already powered that message home.

A crystalline stillness falls when Dukakis rallies her seductive regal elegance to lure Polymester and his two children to their doom in a tent of animal skins draped over sharpened tree limbs. As Dukakis sends a purposeful chill through the house in this splendidly realized scene, Perloff's commitment to the busy actress whose schedule delayed the opening of "Hecuba" is altogether confirmed.

There are some problematic elements in the production. There's a trench of dirt that gets flung and trampled noisily throughout the 95-minute performance. Several of the supporting male performances are not cleanly etched.

But the ensemble is a strong one overall, with Viola Davis standing out as an eloquent Chorus Leader who vibrates in indignant sympathy with the queen. Nothing is more attuned to the heart of this play about the agony and power of women than the nine-member Chorus she leads.

Known for their repertoire of Eastern European choral music, the KITKA singers provide rich and beautifully integrated commentary.